Welcome back. Citations of your business are extremely important to local SEO. But just like traditional SEO, links are still a big ranking factor. As you can imagine, your strategy for developing links is a little bit different for a local business. In this lesson, we'll consider the key questions you should use to evaluate potential links and examine some of the tried and true methods for obtaining quality links. When looking at what links you should acquire to help boost your SEO strategy, you should have a big picture in mind. Don't settle for a poor or mediocre link just because it is easily obtainable. You should focus on quality links that will help your business and SEO as a whole. When considering a link, you should ask yourself the following questions. Will your potential customers be exposed to this link? If so, how likely are they to visit the site? Exposure is great as this helps build visibility, but quality referral traffic is even better. What is the reputation of the site you are seeking a link from? If the site looks low quality and spammy, you should go elsewhere. One, this can potentially harm your SEO strategy by receiving links from low quality sites. And two, it isn't a great idea to have your business associated with spam. Let's discuss some methods for obtaining quality links for your local SEO strategy. Look at Local News Sources. There are a couple of different methods you can try to gain a link from a local news source. Avoid ads, as these paid links will be discounted by search engines. Do your local news sites or blogs accept contributions? Many of these sites will accept stories from the local community. If this is the case, you can often include a link within the story or in the author byline. If they don't accept a story contribution, take a look at what the existing reporters and writers cover. You may find that one covers topics closely related to your business. If so, build a relationship with them. If you see or hear something newsworthy, let the writer know. The author may give you credit for the scoop with a link. In time, you may be able to get them to write about an event your business is hosting or reference your business in some way. Another option is to hold a newsworthy local event. A contest that helps support your community in some way or some other form of community outreach. If the idea is newsworthy, local news sites will pick this up and link to you. Many local blogs and sites will often hold contests where readers will vote on the best type of business for a particular category. For example, when visiting a restaurant, you may see signs like, Voted best breakfast in the Bay Area by local website readers. These contests are usually hosted on local sites that run polls. Pay attention to contests that are taking place, as the winner and runners up can easily get a link back to their website. You may even want to contact the site running the contest to let readers know of any special deals or promotions you have going on through the length of the contest. This will not only incentivize potential customers to visit you, but also may result in an immediate link to your site or page on your site featuring the deal you're referring to. If you are offering something of value to the site's readers, they have a higher chance of linking out to you. You can look for these contests by searching Google, or your local sites for past contests. Once you find sites that have had contests in the past, this means they are likely to hold similar contests in the future. I suggest creating a feed of these sites that you can easily keep updated with. Services like feedly are great for this. You can also set up Google Alerts to search for contests in your area that are relevant to your business. I have included some potential Google search queries that you can use to find past or existing contests in your area. It's a good idea to check contests both on a city level, an area level, such as Bay Area, or East Bay, or even try county names. You can also try state level contests. I also suggest looking for terms like nominate and vote. You should also search for contests specific to your business type. For example, if you are a restaurant, Google something like best restaurant + nominate + your location, for example Davis, to find a list of contests. It is even better if you can get really specific. For example, if you are a restaurant that sells burgers, instead of using the phrase restaurant, use burger. You can see a list of potential opportunities in the screenshot. Trying out all the various terms will be a bit of a time-consuming process but can potentially net you with a lot of quality links and improve your online visibility. Another option for gaining local links are through sponsorship and donation opportunities. There are many organizations that benefit greatly from sponsorships and donations. And a lot of these organizations will have a dedicated place on their website to thank donors for their support. One method for finding these opportunities is through using Google search operators to look for local businesses that have a URL on their site dedicated to sponsors. Simply type your Location + inurl search operator with the keyword sponsors or donors, or donations. Technically, these are paid links, so this is a bit of a grey area. But sponsoring and donating to worthwhile causes shouldn't negatively impact you as long as you keep a well-balanced link profile. If the majority of your link profile was sponsorship opportunities yet you had few links from other sources, this would seem a bit off. Try to make sure sponsorship opportunities make up a smaller portion of your overall backlinks. Another option for acquiring local backlinks is offering discounts to students, teachers and alumni. You can search for local educational institutions to see if they have resources dedicated to student discounts and then contact them to inform them of your business and your discount to its members. You may also find other relative sites that track and publish this type of information. Last but not least, Build/ Leverage Business Relationships. Attend community events, conferences and conventions where you can meet and network with other business owners in your area. This will not only help you from a link building standpoint, but will prove useful in a variety of other ways.
